Building on a legacy of children’s mental health: A systematic review of early childhood social-emotional learning and expulsion prevention professional development

Early childhood education (ECE) providers play a key role in supporting children's early social-emotional learning (SEL). At the same time, providers report feeling ill-prepared to adequately meet children’s emotional and behavioral needs, and thousands of children under the age of five are suspended or expelled each year for behavior that providers find challenging. Thanks in large part to the advocacy of trailblazers, such as Dr. Roger P. Weissberg, Illinois has long been at the vanguard of SEL-related policy, and in 2018, the state passed the nation’s most comprehensive ban on ECE expulsion. Unfortunately, children continue to be excluded from ECE programs. As part of an ongoing evaluation of the implementation of this ban, this study examines whether providers have access to the types of training stipulated in the legislation that would enable them to engage in high-quality social-emotional teaching and reduce their reliance on exclusionary discipline practices. We systematically screened and coded trainings offered by five state agencies (n = 2991) to describe their topical relevance, difficulty, duration, and language. Trainings were rated based on their relevance to exclusionary discipline practices. We found that trainings tended to be short, introductory in nature, and did not match the linguistic diversity of providers across the state. Few trainings explicitly aimed to build skills or strategies that would likely change teachers’ exclusionary discipline practices. When trainings emphasized specific practices supported by the expulsion prevention literature, they were often aligned with specific SEL programs. We discuss these findings and recommendations, considering the state’s long history of advancing young children's and educators' mental health and SEL.